J.T. Warren - Remains

“Coming up on your street,” the cabbie said, and I sat up. We turned onto my road, and up ahead I could see my father’s truck in the driveway. The light was on in the front room. I looked at my watch. Just after eight o’clock.

I looked at the meter and took out cash. When the car pulled to a stop, I handed it through the small window. “Keep it,” I said and he said ‘thanks’. I stepped out and heard the trunk click. I pulled out my suitcase and re-shouldered my backpack. As I closed the trunk, I saw the front room curtains swish. The door would open in a moment, and it would start. I breathed in, then breathed out. The taxi made a turn in the driveway that used to be Mrs. Garraty’s, and then drove away. I stepped forward just as I heard the first deadbolt on the front door turn.

Of course, my mother was the one who opened the front door. I had figured as much. I knew he wouldn’t get up from the television. I had wondered if it would be my mother or father that came out first. I wondered if it was him, would he hug me or not. I suspected not. When I was little, he hugged me a lot, but that stopped a long time ago.

My father was not a gentle man. Some people believe that a boy needs that, I guess. He was never loud or hard with my sisters, but with me it was different. Dr. Bledsoe tells me that my father was abusive with me. I don’t know that that’s true. He wasn’t always. We used to sing to each other on car rides. Something did change, though. He became cruel, mean.

The moment I most remember that change was when he beat the dog. We had a dog that year. My sister Katy had whined all year about getting a dog, and finally my father had given in. She hadn’t wanted a puppy, though. She wanted a dog from the pound. She’d recently gotten to be close with a girl whose parents were members of a few of what my father came to call ‘terrorist organizations’. Mary Thomas was the little girl’s name, and Katy was like her shadow for months; one could not be someplace without the other immediately behind. I think they met at the school’s attempt to have a chess team. When it crumbled, Mary Thomas and Katy stayed friends.

My sister soon after began to beg to stay the night with Mary Thomas’ family. My dad didn’t mind, but my mother was very unsure of it. Katy was still young to her, whereas I saw her as three years older than me, and a virtual adult for all the freedom she had. Eventually, my mother consented, after a well placed phone call from Mary Thomas’ mother. Of course, my father had to take the call and then act as mouthpiece for my mother. He said that she was repotting an Easter Lilly, and her hands were too dirty to hold the phone. Undoubtedly, Mary Thomas’ mother was an avid green thumb, and she invited my mother over to see her Petunias. My mother never went, but Katy was able to go and stay with them overnight. Overnight turned into all weekend. In the space of six months or so, she was hardly returning.

When she would return, though, she and my father would have yelling matches. Sarah and I would were always sensitive to when Katy might return. The minute we saw her walking back toward our house, or heard the winding down of Mary Thomas’ mom’s ancient Toyota, we scrambled. Most of the time, we went for the back yard, but sometimes the attic. The goal was to get as far away as we could as fast as possible.

The screaming was because Katy would come home filled with her new view of the world. Later, I found out that Mary Thomas’ parents were avid members of Greenpeace and a few other similar organizations. Katy was continuously accusing my father either directly, or indirectly, as a part of ‘his generation’, of destroying the world. We didn’t know it at the time, but Katy and Mary Thomas were lovers, as well. This all came out much later.

My father, in an attempt to placate Katy, did get the dog. It was a mutt, and my father would always proclaim what he figured was the dog’s kind, saying things like “That dog is huge. I bet there’s bull Mastiff in there” or “That dog has no fear of water at all; his daddy must have been a Golden Retriever”. My father named the dog “Brutus” and was quite proud of the name. My sister named him “Wolf”. My mother simply called him ‘the dog’. For a time, we all enjoyed the dog, even my mother, though you’d have had to pay close attention to see it.

Katy, though, would only come home long enough to feed it each day, and perhaps (if she was waiting to be picked up by Mary Thomas) to play a few half-hearted games of fetch with it. For Sarah and I, though, the dog was a constant companion on our treks through the fields. Sarah and I brushed him, bathed him. It was Sarah with her kind hand that taught him to sit, to stay, to roll over. None of the rest of us could get him to do these things. His love for Sarah was like most people’s: singular and non-transferable.

None of us, to this day, really understand what happened to dad that summer, though. This was just before the Randy’s disappearance. Mom had taken to sleeping a lot and dad spent quite a bit of time out of the house. He would come home smelling funny and slurring his words. He started to yell at me for things he said I didn’t remember to do around the house. I once asked Sarah after one bout of yelling if she’d heard him tell me to take the garbage to the street and she said “No, it’s Tuesday. Garbage doesn’t come ‘till Thursday.” I still felt bad, though, for letting him down. Dr. Bledsoe said “You internalized your father’s own feelings of inadequacy.” I didn’t know what that meant, but I nodded as though I did.

If he was home when Katy came home, the fights were bad. The screaming seemed to follow me, no matter how far away I got. Brutus got very upset, too. He would scratch at the back door to get in. He did that whenever dad was yelling at me, too, but for some reason I always thought it was worse when he did it while dad was yelling at Katy. I tried to stop him, which only sent him further into fits. He scratched up my arms a lot. Later, after the yelling had died down, and I was waiting on the back porch for dad to go up to bed, Brutus would lick my arms where he’d cut them up. I’d let him, saying “I’m sorry, too.”

On that day, though, I couldn’t hold him back. The door was somehow not completely closed. Katy had come home and my father asked her where she’d been. I heard his slurry voice through the back door and I knew what was coming. I started walking away, thinking Brutus would follow me. After a time, I noticed he hadn’t, and when my father started to yell at Katy, and she started to yell back, I turned just in time to see the dog hit the door with his front paws. It was almost like he knew it would give. He ran in and before I could get there, had gotten between my father and my sister. I skidded to a stop just as Brutus lunged at my dad, teeth gleaming. To be honest, I don’t think he actually meant to bite my father. It didn’t seem like he had leapt far enough for that. I think it was just one of those things dogs do to show they mean business. In my dreams, sometimes, I see that moment in slow motion.

My father, in reflex, dropped the glass he’d been holding. He flinched. My eyes got as big as saucers at seeing my father flinch back in fear from anything. The shattering of the glass seemed like a gunshot going off. Katy hunched her shoulders and put her hand up over her face. Of us, only Brutus remained unfazed, his teeth bared.

The next few moments seemed like molasses. My father coming back to his senses from the fear place he’d gone to, my sister coming unfrozen, me struggling to figure out what had just happened. My father, with what seemed like lightning speed, reached out and grabbed the dog’s collar. The angle he had his arm at, Brutus couldn’t get his head around to bite, so my father dragged the snarling dog out of the room. His eyes locked on mine as he passed me by. My sister stood there, motionless, staring. The back door slammed, then the yelping started.